Sports:
Belfast Giant H.E.R.O.S. is a program run by the professional hockey team of Belfast, the Belfast Giants. H.E.R.O.S. is a residential program, putting young people from Belfast, Holywood, and Dublin together to play hockey and participate in additional relationship-building activities. You can visit the Belfast Giant H.E.R.O.S. website here, and their page on the Ireland funds website here.
PeacePlayers International is an international program, with a branch in Northern Ireland. PeacePlayer’s mission is uniting and educating young people through the sport of basketball. You can visit the PeacePlayers International website here, and their page on the Ireland Funds website here. Both the Belfast Giant H.E.R.O.S. and PeacePlayers International introduce sports not traditionally played in Northern Ireland. We perceive the use of a foreign sport as an attempt to remove recognizable context, which we explore more in our analysis.
In the case of these sports programs, by creating a set of rules on how one must conduct oneself, contained within defined boundaries, with teams created along non-sectarian-specific lines, we would argue these programs actually make it very difficult to orient oneself within pre-conceived notions of boundary and identity. Whether the programs make this move consciously or unconsciously, we argue that the end result is the same; it is far harder to map pre-conceived ideas on to dissimilar circumstances. As we noted before, the fact that the programs we examined focused on sports typically not played in Northern Ireland further obstructs an individual from aligning the ‘game’, or abstraction, along conventional sectarian divisions. Paradoxically, by seeming less real, we argue, it becomes easier to see that both the rules of games and the rules with which people define others’ identities are subjective and arbitrary.